Food industries generate large amount of wastes and by-products that contain highly valuable bioactive compounds The primary waste fraction, which are peel, flesh and seeds residues, contain high amount of bioactive compounds that can be exploited as functional foods, additives, nutraceutical products, health supplements, food ingredients and cosmetics.
Guava industry has produced an important quantity of by-products residues of which accounted 25% of the whole fruit. They are produced at different processing stages, which are crushing, refining and sieving to produce three types of by-products, namely refiner, siever and decanter respectively. Previous study showed that lycopene from guava pulp was higher than sweetened puree (Wilberd and Rodrigues-Amaya, 1995). Insufficient removal of solid particles especially the pulp consisting stone cells lead to the remaining of lycopene in processing by-products.
Lycopene is a carotenoid in the same family as beta carotene, which gives a tomato, and several other fruits, their deep red color. Lycopene is one of the major carotenoids in the diet of North Americans and accounts for close to 50% of the carotenoid distribution found in blood. Foods that are commonly consumed which contain lycopene are tomato products, watermelon, pink grapefruit, apricots, papaya, and guava.
So far, no prior art has disclosed a guava pulp composition having high lycopene content.
PCT/IL2003/000678 discloses a tomato pulp composition wherein the particle size is not greater than 2.5 mm which does not contain seeds or peels from the tomato and has a lycopene concentration which is 5 to 15 folds higher than the lycopene concentration in the tomatoes from which the pulp is obtained. This disclosure further describes an industrial process for obtaining the tomato pulp.
Accordingly, it is advantageous to provide a guava pulp composition having improved organoleptic properties. The guava pulp composition according to the present invention is produced under certain conditions in order to obtain a composition having high lycopene content.